Why your successful site is leaving money on the table

Right now, your sites are making less money than they should be. What should you be doing about it?

Never give up. Never surrender.

Below I list some simple things that you can change on your site right now to increase your income and traffic. Changes that I have made in the past have quadrupled the traffic to one of my sites and increased my income almost 10-fold.

3 Simple changes that can drastically improve your ranking

Like Shoemoney and many other people that already make tons of money from their sites - these 3 changes are second nature to them and they don’t even count them as “SEO.” Yet, I come across site after site that doesn’t have even these tips on their site and are basically throwing away better rankings.

• Keywords in the page Title

Your page title should have the keywords for that specific page in the title. Thats it.

• Keywords in URL

Same as the title, every URL should include the keywords for the page and should “look” static. mod_rewrite is your friend. The only blog software that matters supports this, but doesn’t default to it. Make the change from query looking URLs (ex. ?q=3) to static URLs.

• Content at the top of your HTML

This is the one that many people miss and end up in supplemental hell. If you have so many sidebars, headers, javascript, additional CSS, and formating code that your actual content is waaaaay down in the bottom of your HTML file, the search engines seem to get bored at some point and stop looking down in the file for your unique data. So the top part of your HTML looks the same on all of your pages and Google just slaps a dupe content penalty on the majority of your pages. Cut down on the crap in your HTML or use CSS to allow you to move the actual content as one of the first things in your HTML.

Japanese Kaizen and A/B Testing

• Always keep trying new things

Your site can always be doing better. Don’t stop trying new ads, new content, new linking ideas. Use A/B Testing to find out what moving an Ad does - if it gets you a better CTR make the change on your site and start a new test.

• Accumulate small changes

Kaizen is basically the concept of continuously improving through tiny changes. Adding new content on a consistent basis, and trying the A/B testing above. Looking to places where people talk about new ideas and giving them a spin. Little by little these add up. .5% better click-through, a few hundred more unique readers a day. It all seems like its too little to matter until months later you’ve doubled or quadrupled what your site makes.

Diversify Your Income Sources

Google Adsense has really given so many people the opportunity to make a living, or at least have some extra cash on their passions and hobbies. Its a great start, but eventually you must start diversifying your income, not only to protect yourself from a “single point of failure,” but to really start growing your income levels. Look into things like Text Link Ads(Aff), Azoogle Ads(Aff), Chitika, Amazon, or start filling ad space with house ads.

I once saw a demonstration at a conference where the presenter held up a a ten dollar bill and said he was selling it for one dollar for the next 10 seconds. The whole audience just stared at him for the first 8 seconds, until one person caught on and ran up and bought a $10 bill for only $1. Next, he held up a $20 and again, sold it for a $1 for the next 10 seconds. It still took almost the full 10 seconds before someone took the initiative to get out of their seat and take the free money. The rest of the audience just sat there. For some reason, most people are OK being the ones who sit around and watch everyone else actually do things. Who are you going to be today? The masses that sit in their seats, or the guy who simply walks up and takes whats waiting for you?

Updated (2007/3/30): Added Azoogle Link + fixed a formatting error with the amazon link.